I think this mid-key photo looks more like a textile or fabric than the reality it depicts: the vast stone walls of The Wave.

This is a view of Bridalveil Falls and Cathedral Spires in Yosemite Valley processed to simulate a pinhole camera: vignetting at the edges, softness, brightness in the center, high depth-of-field, and an overall antique look.

Digital simulations of “looks” from the back pages of classic analog photography are great fun!

While on the topic of infrared captures, this is an IR photo of a drydock at the old Mare Island naval shipyard. I particularly noticed the way the infrared capture increased the contrast and drama in the sky.

To enhance this monochromatic winter vista of Yosemite, I used a split toning effect. I added a deeper sepia tone to the darker tones, and lighter sepia to the brighter areas of the image.

In the analog darkroom, toning was a function of paper, processing and chemistry. Split toning was achieved by altering the process so that highlights were handled differently from the dark areas of the photo; for example, by stopping a chemical bath at an earlier point than normal.

In the Photoshop darkroom toning and split toning are, of course, virtual—like the entire digital monochromatic process. Digital black and white is an aesthetic intention with soul, a willful abnegation of color, and an intentional and anachronistic reference to the historical craft of photography.

You can learn more about toning and split toning techniques in Photoshop in Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Technques.

This is a black and white rendition of my rather dramatic fisheye image of Bristlecone Pines, some of the oldest living things, photographed in the White Mountains along the California-Nevada border.

The Wave is a marvelous rock formation on the Utah-Arizona border. You can read about some of my adventures visiting The Wave in this story written a few years back, and see some of my other photos of the place. Lost in the Desert continues the story of what happened after I photographed The Wave.

Most of my photos of The Wave are in color—but this is a good subject for black and white as well. In this photo, the monochrome helps to mask the scale of the place: you don’t know at a glance whether it is big or small. Answer: very, very big.

I photographed this scene of mist in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during a winter trip to Yosemite Valley a few years back. The image always intrigued me when I looked at the RAW file in Adobe Bridge, but I never could see it as a color photo.

But black and white is another story! I did the conversion to black and white in the process of creating a demonstration for my upcoming new book in my Creative series, Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips and Techniques.

On a bright, blustery winter day I wandered the Marin Headlands with photographer and friend Steven C. It’s amazing how close this beautiful area is to downtown San Francisco. This shot is looking towards the opening to Tennessee Beach from the ocean side (you can’t see the beach itself).

This was a day of extraordinarily heavy surf, and I spent most of my time photographing the explosive action of the waves—as close to the action as I felt safe. But I couldn’t resist an overall shot of the spectacular landscape, captured in full, living RAW color, multi-RAW processed to extend the dynamic range, then converted to black and white using a layer stack of Photoshop adjustment layers, primarily the Red Filter preset and the Infrared preset (for the sky).

In other words, the photo is a sort of non-HDR HDR created by hand—meaning that the tonal and dynamic ranges are greater than you would normally get from a single capture, rendered in black & white, and without the garish look so common in HDR photography.

New Year’s Eve featured a blue moon rising early, but the layers of fog and clouds that swept over San Francisco Bay made a capture seem unlikely.

When the moon made a brief appearance through a rift in the clouds I was ready, with an exposure biased towards the moonlight. The composition is based on the idea of letting everything besides the moon and its light on the water go pitch black. And also on the aesthetic pleasures of grain, er, I mean noise.

Exposure data: Nikon D300, 65mm, 1/30 of a second at f/5.0 and ISO 3200, hand held; yes, folks, you read that right, ISO 3,200. Look ma, no tripod.

In my previous post I showed a photo taken a few years ago of Yosemite Valley—and noted that the work of a digital photography is never definitively done. It’s tempting, and often but not always an improvement, to rework the post-processing of older images; or to process images bypassed in the first edit.

You also don’t need to make an either-or choice between color and black & white. This image shown in this story was re-purposed into monochrome from the color photo in the last story. I created the dramatic black-and-white sky using a high contrast Red filter b&w adjustment layer in Photoshop, in case you are interested.

There’s some disagreement over on Flickr as to whether the black & white or color version is preferred (see the linked comments). I say, why not have both? A “two-fer”…